The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  I flinched. “I’m sorry,” I said lamely. He had not raised his voice the whole time and I felt deafened.

  “Sorry! Shalt be sorry. I ought to make thee build them a new one, by hand. They’ve offered to take recompense in labor: we could apprentice thee seven years to a stonemason there.”

  Seven years? In the desolate Westlands? I caught my breath. Gaston was quite capable of disciplining us as he disciplined his enlisted men, I had heard tales from Alexander and Marfisa—

  His eyes flashed as he rounded on me. “And the stupidity of using such sorcery, untrained! Why didst never ask if thou’rt curious?”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “Obviously not,” he said bitingly.

  I had meant to say, I didn’t think anyone would approve. There was a distaste for magic in Gaston, I had detected it clearly. “I would have—”

  “But thou didst not! Lagwit! If thou knew’st enow to do that, thou knew’st eke ’twas dangerous. Flaunting folly! In the future—” He was interrupted by a knock.

  Freia came in, flicked an expressionless look over me, and nodded to her husband. Gaston followed her out with one word to me: “Wait,” flat and hard. He was really, really angry. I swallowed, shaking. He might be angry enough to make me swear not to use sorcery again, not to experiment with it or study it …

  Mother had just shaken her head at me and said, “That was an ill-considered thing to do, Gwydion,” when the Ellilizeës had haled her out there. She had come back with me on the Road and said nothing more. Gaston had berated me for about an hour. Now they must be deciding what to do.

  I leaned against the tall window behind me and covered my face. The clock ticked. Outside, below in the burgeoning garden, someone pushed a lawnmower back and forth, the blades whirring and clucking rhythmically, whick-whick-whick. Insects buzzed. It was summer.

  They had been planning to raze the barn anyway. Did it really matter how it got knocked down? I gritted my teeth to keep from crying. Gaston was so angry, and Mother so icily cold … He was right, I was supposed to be impressing them with how nice we were … I had blown it, for Argylle, not just for myself. There was no way to repair the damage.

  The door opened and closed and I jumped, dropping my hands.

  A man I’d met only twice before in my memory stood looking at me quizzically, then approached slowly to stand by me and look out the window. Taller than I, he had a short beard and looked less like Mother than I would have expected: her brother Dewar. I didn’t know much about him except that he was liked hesitantly by most people in Argylle; that he was Prospero’s son through a woman from Noroison and there was something about that nobody wanted to talk about; and that he was a sorcerer of already-legendary ability, bidding fair to outshine his famous father. His cloak, heavier than the day warranted, was dark blue-green, and his quilted tunic was a nondescript sandy color. His hair was longer than Argylle men usually wore it, curlier than Mother’s and tied at the nape of his neck with a blue-green ribbon. He wore mottled grey trousers and high brown boots, also unseasonably heavy and spattered with light-red mud, and on his hands were brown gauntlets that he slowly drew off as he peered down into the garden.

  He turned to me suddenly and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Come,” was all he said, pulling me forward toward the window, and he gestured and spoke a word. We passed through the window, but not through it. The world flipped around us. We stood in a manycolored desert surrounded by towering piles of weathered rocks, under a triangle formed by two massive monoliths tilted together. The light was ruddy, from a low, swollen red sun. I realized he had taken us through a Way without my even being aware of it. The window had been the focus—

  “Show me what you did,” Uncle Dewar directed me, interrupting my thoughts.

  I stared at him.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Do it.”

  Trembling, I did. A pile of rocks shuddered and fell. It was a spell for loosening the bonds between objects, useful for disrupting, say, stone walls … or barns.

  “You worked that one out for yourself?” he asked calmly, when the dust had begun to settle.

  “N-n-no.”

  My uncle nodded as if I had confirmed his worst suspicions. “What have you been reading?”

  I told him: “Doctor Mervyn’s Compendium of the Arts Magical.”

  “Garbage, pure garbage. Forget it. Sloppy stuff. You’re putting six times as much effort into that spell as you need to. Where’d you find that, anyway?”

  He laid his hand on my shoulder again, murmuring something too quick and low for my ear to catch, and in a step we were in a musty room. How had he made the Way? I wondered. Uncle Dewar frowned and opened a couple of windows. The workaday sounds of the lawnmower, of insects, floated in. We were in Argylle again.

  I looked around, trying to be inconspicuous. So this was what Uncle Dewar’s rooms were like. I had never been in them. The windows were high, diamond-paned and arched, and at the tops, in the arches, were curled stained-glass vines on which a sun and a moon and various planets and stars grew among heart-shaped green leaves. Comfortable, if dusty, leaf-patterned cushions were in the window seats. Immediately behind me was a high black-bordered mirror, and I supposed that we had come through it, if it were a Mirror of Ways. All along one wall bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling; in the middle of the floor stood a long black-topped worktable and tall stools; and on the wall opposite the bookshelves were glass-fronted cabinets filled with things I could not clearly see through the dust-veiled glass: sorcerous instruments of metal and glass and wood, small caskets and rows of glass jars. There were small, elaborately-patterned multicolored rugs here and there on the stone floor. Two tall closed doors were to either side of the instrument cabinets, one beside the windows and one near the door that led into the hallway, and there was a sink in one end of the workbench. There was a drafting table in one corner and a rolltop desk, closed and locked, in another, with a green-globed lamp hanging from a chain above it and more bookshelves built into the walls around it, and all the bookshelves were filled with books, overfilled with books, books bound in black and red and brown and blue and green leathers, brown folios, books made of carven slabs of wood and sheets of bark, books whose bindings were ornately tooled and gilded and books whose bindings were rotting, books held together with string and several stacks of parchment pages weighted with strangely shaped bits of metal or mineral specimens or round color-dappled polished glass balls, books stacked on top of each other and books double-layered on the shelves, books laid on top of the shelved books and books with bits of ribbon lolling out like weary tongues to mark pages, thick books and thin books and long narrow books and several round black jars of scrolls in wooden cases.

  I answered his question. “I, I found it in the Archives, and, uh, Dazhur gave me some ideas …”

  He shook his head and tsked. “Let’s start with the idea of balance,” he began, pointing to a three-legged stool and taking off his cloak to hang it on a plain peg behind the hall door.

  Thus began my first lesson in sorcery from my uncle, who was now my tutor, and who thenceforward went almost everywhere with me—Argylle and its demesnes, and later Morven and Phesaotois and the Great Court at Noroison. Golden-blonde, voluptuous Dazhur, who lived in a cottage on the dark fringe of Threshwood, did not even look at me again, which was too bad, because she was something to look at herself. I overheard part of the explanation for that by accident, the day after he arrived. My window was open and Freia and Dewar were in his rooms below, the window also open. I happened to be reading in my window seat, feet up, head down, poring over one of the books Uncle Dewar had given me to study.

  “He’s picked up a few very bad habits from Dazhur,” Dewar said, “but he’s young and he’ll lose them fast once he’s learned the right way to do things.”

  “From Dazhur! Dazhur?” My mother’s voice was horrified.

  “Yes, I’m surprised she’s still—”

  “Dewar! He’s sixteen y
ears old!”

  A few seconds of silence. “Oh. I’ll speak to her.”

  “I’ll speak to her,” my mother said, meaningly. “Libidinous bitch! She thinks I’m a pushover.”

  “You are. Let Gaston—”

  “He’d just kill her.”

  “Do you think—”

  “No. I will talk to her, and you won’t mention it. Agreed?”

  “As you wish, madame.” He chuckled. “Argylle wouldn’t be the same without her.”

  “You have no taste.”

  Another chuckle.

  I wondered what was so bad about Dazhur. She had been very friendly to me. My old school dictionary didn’t have “libidinous” in it, and when my uncle told me it meant “salacious” I supposed it had something to do with chemistry.

  Dewar had been as much a parent to me as Gaston or Freia, and I loved him as dearly as either of them. I had learned most of what I knew of sorcery from him, here and at Noroison, and had studied further on my own with his guidance. Our master-apprentice relationship was unusual in that Dewar had taught me complete spells. The common practice—since the apprentice you train today will be your rival tomorrow—is to give the most miserly training possible and bind your apprentice to you with the Oath of Blood and dependencies of many kinds while using him for all he’s worth for whatever dirty work comes to mind. That was how Dewar had been taught by his mother the Black Countess Odile and that mightiest sorcerer of Morven, Paracelsus.

  Uncle Dewar had thumbed his nose gleefully at that tradition. He used his own and his father’s grimoires and notebooks to teach me things that most sorcerers take years to figure out for themselves. He gave me complete spells, special ones he had developed himself, and encouraged me to tinker and modify and make mistakes. Most importantly, he had taught me his way of spinning spells with all three forces available—the Well, the Stone, and the Spring—something no one else in the world could do. This generous attitude raised eyebrows in Phesaotois, at the heart of which Morven lies like a stone in a net, and many were the voices that promised doom to come because of it.

  It also, I flattered myself, resulted in me being a precociously well-equipped young sorcerer with more power available to me than any other had ever had at my age and a better understanding of what I could do with it.

  “I wasted so much time with this …” Dewar would say, or “It was so damned frustrating to do this before I figured out …” and he would explain an elegant simplification, or “If only someone had shown me this when I was learning that …”

  He had taught me languages, history, mathematics, logic, geomancy, everything. Dewar had guided me on the Road and answered, honestly and evenhandedly, questions about everything from politics and poisons to sex and family history. He had filled the cup for me at Argylle’s Spring when I drank of it and secretly brought me to the Stone on Morven in Phesaotois. I could ask him anything and I would do, unhesitatingly, anything he asked me to. I relied on him for good advice, good arguments, and good companionship—we shared tastes in a number of things.

  How had he known I was in imminent danger of being eaten by Gemnamnon? I wasn’t perfectly sure, but I suspected that Ariel was capable of keeping watch on people and events anywhere and reporting to Dewar on them. It was part of the nature of a Sylph that all places be the same to it. But how could Dewar have bound Ariel again at all? Ages ago, Prospero had kept his word and freed Ariel forever, under duress. He did not like to talk about it.

  Like all sorcerers, my uncle was continually working to expand his repertoire, although unlike the vast majority of the others Dewar was moved by curiosity rather than a craving to enhance his prestige or the need to maintain his territory. His position of perfect security in Argylle, without rivals against whom he must continually guard and defend as in Phesaotois and Pheyarcet, provided him with an ideal base for his investigations into … into anything that caught his attention. Yet he was not always in Argylle.

  He had residences scattered along the Roads, throughout the worlds dependent on the Well and the Stone, but Argylle was home to him. In this he was as his peers, for I had always known he carried out other experiments in those places, work too intense, too difficult, too dangerous to pursue at home. Dewar, greatly as he had trusted me, had kept certain things dead secret—among them, the locations of his personal, private hiding-places and what he did there. I had asked him once, and he had said that a secret known to more than one person is no longer secret and refused to discuss the subject further.

  It seemed that one thing he had done in seclusion was to teach himself of the binding of Elementals. His father Prospero had been the preeminent Master of the Elements before his involuntary retirement. Conquering their will with one’s own is the supreme triumph for a sorcerer. Dewar certainly had the strength of mind for the feat, and by all evidence had accomplished it. What would Prospero think?

  For now, I would keep my mouth closed, I decided. Nor would I pursue Dewar in any way. I was fairly sure that I could find him swiftly if I wanted to, if there were a desperate need for him, but I also knew that doing so would be dangerous for both of us and would certainly bring in an angry sorcerer in a far-from-amiable frame of mind.

  I turned my thoughts to the dragon Gemnamnon. What had Dewar done with, or to, him? He had said something equivalent to “not dead but displaced.” Using Ariel’s capacity to shepherd winds, perhaps with a Way (I would do it thus), he had removed the beast—I hoped not to a populous, hospitable, or easily-departed region. Dewar had not thought the dragon would be back, but I suspected he would, eager for vengeance, and he would start right here. Otto’s Hunnondáligi had trailed him through a Way, along the Road. Gemnamnon had far more reason for revenge.

  Marfisa and I tottered about the Citadel, I under my own steam and Marfisa with her squire Tellin tucked under her shoulder. Worn by incessant pain, my sister leaned on Tellin’s judgement as well as her arm, and Tellin minded her mistress’s health better than Marfisa would have done. Alexander recuperated quickly and was soon down in the practice yards pulling a bow, fencing with Prospero and anyone who’d go up against him, and engaging in his usual fanatical physical training. Belphoebe reported that the incursions of monsters had abated entirely. We speculated that they had been related to the dragon. Prospero returned to Ollol and the wine negotiations and I returned to the Chair, finding that a new respect had infused the behavior of petitioners and Councillors.

  Marfisa continued with crutches and then a cane, though Tellin was always beside or behind her. Her left leg was withered and twisted. When she could mount a horse (a chariot was out of the question and she wouldn’t use a coach), she had Tellin pack their saddlebags and the two of them went to Landuc with Alexander, who seemed to blame me for the whole fiasco. Whether Marfisa did or not I could not discover, but I thought not; Tellin was as open and friendly to me as before the fight. Had Marfisa blamed me, surely Tellin would have turned a cold shoulder to me out of her love for Marfisa.

  I was truly sorry to see them go. Their company had been diverting in the darkening days of midwinter, but they left before New Year’s, which is celebrated at the Winter Solstice in Argylle. Morosely, I wondered if they even remembered the significance of the day to our family and then shrugged. The loss was theirs, if they didn’t care enough to stay.

  As was my custom, however, I took a lantern and went down the long black stone stair in the Core of the Citadel to visit my late mother.

  I sat on the ornate iron park bench from the Argylle City Botanical Gardens which someone had thoughtfully placed there—I suspected Freia or Dewar; it was their sort of joke—and looked at the dark pool, washed in its currents of life. Light from the lantern illuminated nothing in or around the Spring. Taking my Keys out, I chose Freia’s and held it, running my thumb over it. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated on the faint taste of personality in the sensations the Spring evoked.

  In the past I had managed, I believed, to make a connection with her. B
ut not this time. I felt an awareness but it was not open to me. I waited there for a long time, hoping she would change her mind, but there was nothing.

  Finally I opened my eyes and rubbed at my temples. “Very well,” I said aloud, “be that way.”

  No reaction.

  At the sound of a footfall behind me, I turned and glared, annoyed at being followed. Prospero stood there, no light in his hand, at the edge of the circle of mine.

  “Call as you will; there’s none to answer here,” he said, and joined me on the bench.

  I was faintly embarrassed. “I am superstitious, I guess,” I replied.

  “Nowise … She haunts us yet, too attached to part so untimely soon. Poor girl. Drowning, more than drowning …” He looked around at the massive stone pillars and the full darkness beyond them and then back at the insubstantial Spring. “ ’Tis a pity it could not be one of the Node-founts, if water must be her doom. Outdoors, in open air, among the folk she loved. Best were the one in the Square. The market bustle, the people’s never-ending comedy …”

  I thought he was mocking me. “Next time I’ll bring flowers,” I snapped.

  He glanced at me and I saw that he was serious.

  “It is a wretched sort of tomb,” I conceded.

  He nodded. “Mine’s far pleasanter.” A ghost of a smile came and went. Prospero’s tomb is already built, owing to a family tradition, back in Landuc’s royal repository, which is in a breathtakingly lovely park in the Palace grounds. When someone is born in Landuc, the family selects an auspicious location and builds his tomb or puts up a marker with the name and the birthdate on his gravesite. Just to keep them on their toes, maybe. Prospero has more than once expressed his preference for a common grave over “that pompous compost heap,” meaning the Imperial Tombs.

  “But this is close to home. She can keep an eye on us here.”

  “And does,” he concurred. “You asked me once about that feeling … ’twas years ago now. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”